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The Broken (2008) [REVIEW]

Pretty sure that this movie made its way into the queue as I was browsing the “Supernatural Horror” section of Netflix Instant. The horror selection is generally pretty shitty, at least as far as the lesser-known films, since there actually are a good amount of enjoyable films that I’ve already seen. I think this movie had an average rating of 3 stars, which for something on Netflix that I hadn’t heard of, is pretty damn good. I was a little hesitant when I saw that this was involved in the “After Dark” horror festival, considering I have only seen one that was tolerable. Most of them have been pretty bad, but Rampaige and I love that supernatural horror stuff, so we threw caution to the wind and gave it a shot. Oh yeah, and this one’s going to have spoilers, before all you babies start crying.

Don’t stand too close to that mirror OR IT MIGHT EXPLODE AND SOMEONE WILL COME OUT OF IT TO TRY TO FUCKING KILL YOU AND REPLACE YOUR LIIIIIIIIIFE!!!!!

We see a Dr. Gina McVey, played by Lena Headey, looking at the x-ray of a rare disorder where a man’s heart is on the right side of his body instead of his left. We follow the doctor to a family dinner, which is rudely interrupted by a mirror mysteriously breaking. The next day, Gina sees her exact double in the same car as she drives, and thinking that’s weird, follows that person home. She goes into this double’s apartment and sees pictures of herself with her own father, and is freaked out by this. As she drives away, Gina gets into an accident. After the accident, Gina asks to stay with her boyfriend since she is still rattled and confused by the events of the day. Her boyfriend looks exactly the same, but something seems different about him. Weird, right?! Other people who were at the dinner are also having strange experiences involving mirrors mysteriously breaking, and the whole movie just kind of gives you a sense of unease, and that something freaky-deaky is going on. What we find out throughout the course of the movie is the fact that every time a mirror breaks, it is a doppleganger coming out into the world, and Gena’s friends and family are slowly being replaced. When Gina goes back to the apartment of the “double”, she sees her own dead body laying in the bathroom. It turns out that when Gina went to investigate the double in the beginning of the movie, the original Gina was killed by the double, and every time we saw Gina after that scene, it was actually the double! But she forgot all of that shit because of the car accident! The car accident fucked with her brain! So when she goes back to the hospital to give herself a physical and see if she is healthy…WE LEARN THAT HER HEART IS ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF HER BODY INSTEAD OF HER LEFT! THE X-RAY FROM THE BEGINNING WAS ANOTHER DOUBLE! CRISS ANGEL MIIIIINDFREEEEEEAK!!!!!!!!!

Now you’ll know what all of your outfits will look like if you are bleeding from the head on the floor of a bathroom while also suffocating from a plastic bag.

Those might seem like sarcastic capitalizations back there, but they are genuine. The movie itself was about 90 minutes, and the discovery that she really is the double happens about fifteen minutes before the movie ends. You could kind of predict that something weird was going on with the friends and family, but that reveal took me by surprise. Add to that the nice tag at the end with the x-rays, which I had to explain to Rampaige, I was quite entertained. The movie was a slow burn towards that final reveal, and even though it was slow-paced, I was still engaged. Maybe it was because it was made in the UK and I wanted to think it was cooler because it was made by British people, but who knows. I was also really glad to see a movie deal with the concept of dopplegangers, which to me are terrifying. Not so much the idea of a duplicate of you trying to kill and replace you, but just the idea that there is an exact duplicate of you out there, somewhere, doing what they want to do. The mythology of dopplegangers being harbingers of death is pretty interesting too, like the fact that Abraham Lincoln claimed to have seen and dreamed of a doppleganger. Maybe it was because I had expected so little that I enjoyed it so much, but all that matters was it was short, it had a fun twist, and I would recommend it to others.